Sketch Comedy’s New Faces on TV

Endless supply of young, funny people; endless need for small-screen content: Yeah, it makes perfect sense that sketch comedy is suddenly turning up across the TV landscape. Some of it is kind of lazy, like Fox’s new “Party Over Here.” But some of it is enlivening usually drab corners, like “Night Class” on — what? — the History channel. And, best of all, some of it is brashly experimental.

That last category describes “The Characters,” an eight-part offering that went up Friday on Netflix. It’s a sort of long-form variation of the usual mishmash of short skits. Eight comics have each been given a full show — roughly a half-hour each — to do whatever they want, and the best results are comedic tapestries full of interconnected characters and sharp satire.

There is, for instance, the episode by Natasha Rothwell, a black comic who starts out with a character who has been called for jury duty. Before that woman has even made it to the courthouse, we’ve also met a homeless person on the subway who spends a lot of time in the New York Public Library and has read whatever books the other passengers are reading, knowledge that becomes an extortion device.

At the courthouse, there is an outlandish collection of other jurors. Best of all is a devastating side trip to a doctor’s office, where a white patient is treated by another of Ms. Rothwell’s characters for chigger bites. White people are scared of chiggers.

Ms. Rothwell plays most of the main characters, and by the half-hour’s end she has created a microcosm of American society and its problems.

Kate Berlant also turns in an attention-getting episode but does it by taking a deep dive into one particular world: that of pretentious art. Her main character is Denise, an artist who is gushed over by assorted highbrows and spouts artsy nonsense that’s barely distinguishable from what you might hear at an actual gallery opening.

“I don’t relate to the title of artist,” Denise says. “I don’t like it when people force that on me. It brutalizes me into a genre, and that’s an act of violence.”

Yes, this world is an easy target, but Ms. Berlant bores into it with an admirable relentlessness. A few of the “Characters” episodes are a bit too much like audition reels, but for the most part these comics have made good use of the opportunity.

Speaking of pretentious artists, Elizabeth Shapiro introduced us to one recently in a segment of her “Crossroads of History,” one of the mini-shows that constitute a new comedy block late Thursdays on the History channel. “Crossroads,” which Ms. Shapiro created and writes, takes bite-size looks at unexamined moments that had profound impacts on history. The sketch in question imagined the session at which an art school rejected an aspiring young painter named Adolf Hitler.

The History channel’s comedy block, which began last month, is called “Night Class” and also includes “Great Minds With Dan Harmon.” Mr. Harmon, the veteran writer and producer of shows like “Community” and “Rick and Morty,” presides over an unreliable time machine that brings historical figures (played by some very recognizable people) into the present. In one recent episode Jack Black made a hysterical Beethoven. Who knew so many of Beethoven’s great works had lyrics? Who knew those lyrics would be so moronic?

If “The Characters” and “Night Class” are refreshing variations on the sketch-comedy genre, Fox’s “Party Over Here” felt predictable in its debut episode on Saturday night. The show features three young comics — Nicole Byer, Alison Rich and Jessica McKenna — mixing taped sketches with segments delivered in front of an audience.

There was a sketch in which Ms. Rich got excessively excited about yogurt; one in which a young suffragist (Ms. Rich again) didn’t quite grasp the importance of the cause; a “Beauty and the Beast” parody in which Belle may have climbed into bed with the wrong beast. It was so-so stuff, which isn’t enough to separate this series from “Saturday Night Live” or the sketches that are all over the late-night talk shows these days. Yes, sketch comedy is an easy and cheap way to fill airtime, but the bar is getting higher.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: Sketch Comedy, Pushing Buttons, Has the Wind at Its Back. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe